What’s your Orientation?:??

[Somatek]

Are you a horizontal or vertical grower and why?

I’m a big fan of vertical gardens to minimize the footprint while maximising yield but I’m also biased after growing in a vertical SoG set up before plant counts were a thing.  Seeing the yield from 700-800 plants grown in a 5ft diameter had be sold it’s the most efficient way to grow plant under artificial lights.  It’s a lot more work taking/transplanting that many clones (roughly 2400 every 2 weeks to ensure that there’d be a consistent 800 with equal root/shoot mass to one another for and even canopy) but with almost no veg time (under a week) it was much harder for bugs to get established as they don’t have time to breed and multiply.

What’s your favourite and why?

[Brad104]

I’ve been preferring the horizontal grow of late, for I like to keep all my tops the same height so there’s not a main cola and I get 7 -9 Nice 🙂 top buds you just can’t let one take over,they must be kept at the same height.Thats my preference here lately I am not saying you get any bigger yield, you just get more nice top buds.

[Somatek]

Keeping an even canopy is essential and trimming the lower growth that doesn’t get enough definitely reduces the larf and gives you bigger tops which are easier to trim.  Like you said though overall the end weight doesn’t change significantly, just the quality of the finished bud.

[Atom]

I go horizontal with lst then just let them go. I remove bottom 50% or so when I flip and defoliation once a week till week 3. Then pretty much leave em be. If there’s leaves touching I missed I might remove them or sometimes buds here and there after 3rd week.

[Keith]

Females

[Keith]

My pictures clearly show I grow horizontally 

[Somatek]

Lol, well played sir!

[Brad104]

Super nice looking buds @keith good job bro

[Somatek]

I was kind of expecting horizontal to be the standard answer but was curious if there was any growers hanging lights between plants to grow beastly plants.

[Keith]

When I first started I bought some of these little led light strips.  And I had them on the sides.  I asked questions about if it was hurting or helping and people mostly just said it was useless bc they were too weak.  Prob true but I never got the question answered about supplemental side lighting I just forgot about it amongst the thousand other things i still had to learn.  I wondered if it would confuse the plant as to which way to grow.  It’s something I haven’t ever looked back into bc it doesn’t matter much at this point.  I’m having a hard enough time getting enough light on top of the plant let alone the sides.  Even after I look it up I’d still love to hear what you have to say about it.

[Somatek]

I haven’t seen any studies about the effects of side lighting but I’m happy to dig into the theories of it all.  Ideally we’d have adequate lighting over the entire plant for optimal growth as plants/branches in low light start to stretch or grow sparse, larfy flowers as well as acting less as carbon sources and potentially becoming carbon sinks if the light level is low enough.  Outdoors in full sun the plants get enough light that it’s rarely an issue other then pruning the center of the plant if it’s heavily shaded.

Indoors is where is where we struggle with even light penetration to ensure an even canopy of nice buds with the main strategies being either SoG or Scrog to achieve that.  Growing vertically doesn’t change that dynamic it changes affects light distribution with the idea being to increase efficiency since no light is reflected which reduces the amount of energy significantly as well as creating issues with hot spots of uneven light distribution.

Adding vertical side lighting in a horizontal grow would make sense if the canopy depth was great enough that the lower parts of the plants didn’t get adequate light.  On the other hand it opens up the question of what’s the point in spending more resources to grow bigger plants, that need supplemental lighting when instead we can control plant height based on veg time?  So for example in a greenhouse, growing seeds where the flowering schedule or plant size isn’t necessarily controlled it could easily make sense compared to growing clones in a tent where we have control of the variables to control plant size directly.

It’s the kind of question that has no clear, definitive answer as it depends entirely on the “how and why” of the grower based on their needs/resources.  Often that kind of nuance is lost on the interwebs so I hope that helps and don’t hesitate to ask if I can clarify anything.  That is an excellent question which will probably help a lot of people, while opening up more discussions about the nuances of growing.

[Keith]

That was very well said, and it makes sense.  Instead on growing plants so big they need supplemental lighting why not just control the size so they only need lighting up top.  The energy and lights I’d be putting into side lighting could go into another 2 or 3 plants being grown in another location.  That makes sense.

[Somatek]

Taken to the extreme we get SoG where plants are barely vegged but specifically flowered small at high densities to achieve plants which are a single cola each of prime bud with no prunning/training needed, just a whole whack of clones.  It’s a personal pet peeve that laws often force growers to grow in an inefficient way due to the stigma from prohibition.  I’ve been telling all the Canadian growers to write to their MP’s as our dope laws are being reviewed to voice their opinion that home growing laws should be based on relevant factors to yield like canopy space in flower (just like micro LP licenses) and not plant numbers which have no relevance to yield what so ever and just enables the black market.  That way people can grow more efficiently in a SoG if they want but more importantly wouldn’t be restricted in how many moms they can collect, which again has no relevance to yield but does infringe on our right to enjoy our hobby.

[Author]

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